When visual artist Yoi Kasama asked children to put sticky coloured dots on a white room in an Australian gallery space the result, called ‘The Obliteration Room’, perfectly illustrates the natural creativity of children.

Research fresh out of Michigan State University, published online in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggests that of the 491 12-year-olds studied, the ones who play video games tend to be more creative, regardless of whether those games are violent–and that the more they play, the more creative they are.

What do you get when you cross speed-dating with brainstorming? Yup, ‘speedstorming’ a rapid technique for coming up with ideas and assessing potential partners for collaboration. The psychologists who came up with the technique describe it like this:

“Speedstorming is similar in structure to therecent phenomenon of speed-dating. Since itsorigination in 1998, speed-dating has inspireda host of business-oriented adaptations, including speed-interviewing (Angelo, 2006)and speed-networking (McGregor, 2006). Theterm ‘speedstorming’ aims to set it apart as atopic to be formally explored and empiricallyinvestigated (as brainstorming has been).Speedstorming uses a round-robin formatfor generating ideas and identifying potential creative collaborators. First, people aredivided into pairs. The pairs can be matchedbased on certain characteristics (e.g., with eachparticipant from a different discipline ordepartment), or assigned at random, depending on the aims of the session. Pairs are given afocused topic of conversation, with the aim ofgenerating ideas to pursue collaboratively bythe end of each 3–5 minute round. At the endof the round, the pair finalizes their idea onpaper, separately rates their impressions oftheir partner, and then moves on to their nextinteraction. By the end of the event, eachperson has generated ideas with severalothers, and in so doing was able to form initialassessments of each partnership’s potential forproductive and creative collaboration.”

IDEO’s Tim Brown at a recent TED talk. Interviews with Tim appear in Business Playground, the book.